Disclaimer:

These are my personal views and are meant for Informational purpose only. Please verify the Information via Professional help or via Official references before acting upon the information provided in this Blog.

How to remove line feeds (lf) and character return (cr) from a text field in SQL Server?

Standard

I was doing some data cleaning the other day, I ran into the issue of text fields having line feeds (lf) and character returns (cr) — this creates a lot of issues when you do data import/export. I had run into this problem sometime before as well and didn’t remember what I did back then so I am putting the solution here so it can be referenced later if need be.

To solve this, you need to remove LF, CR and/or combination of both. here’s the T-SQL syntax for SQL Server to do so:

SELECT REPLACE(REPLACE(@YourFieldName, CHAR(10), ' '), CHAR(13), ' ')

if you’re using some other database system then you need to figure out how to identify CR and LF’s — in SQL Server, the Char() function helps do that and there should be something similar for the database system that you’re using.